31 October 1958 is the date of the notorious meeting of the Moscow branch of the Union of Soviet Writers, called to ‘consider’ the case of Boris Pasternak after he published Dr Zhivago abroad and was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Thе meeting was held at the Union building on Vorovsky St, at the end of which towers the Stalin ‘wedding cake’ of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The poets Leonid Martynov (1905-80) and Boris Slutsky (1919-86) voted to expel Pasternak. Slutsky made a brief speech in favour of the motion; most sources agree that he never forgave himself for doing so.

The first epigraph is from the opening of Martynov’s poem ‘The Chronicler of Tobolsk’ (‘Tobol’skii letopisets’, 1936), about a pre-revolutionary convict who has had his nostrils ripped by the state’s executioner, a standard form of punishment: ‘From morning on Soimonov was full of anguish, in a dream he had seen Peter [the Great]./The Tsar gave him a sniff of tobacco, but chortled as he said/‘With your ripped nostrils you’re going to spill it!’/That dream evoked sharp anguish.’ (Соймонов тосковал с утра,—/во сне увидел он Петра./Царь дал понюхать табаку,/но усмехнулся, говоря:/— Просыплешь, рваная ноздря! —/Сон вызвал острую тоску.) In editions of Loseff’s poetry теку, the last word of the epigraph, is evidently a misprint.

The second epigraph derives from Slutsky’s poem about his service as a prosecutor when he was a political officer (politruk) during the Great Patriotic War, which inevitably evokes ‘the Pasternak affair’: ‘I used to be a judge, I know for sure/that judging people isn’t awkward in the least/—it’s only later on that you feel sick/if you make the mistake of remembering…’ (‘Я судил людей и знаю точно,/что судить людей совсем несложно - /только погодя бывает тошно, /если вспомнишь как-нибудь оплошно’.)